Hello readers!
This week in my ASTU class, we are continuing to analyze the remembrance of 9/11 through Johnathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which I mentioned in my last blog post. However, we also have read “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect” from literary theorist Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable. As the title suggests, Butler focuses on the vulnerability of the body, as well as the impact of interpretation and perspective regarding the lens through which we see and remember trauma.
Something that really struck me about “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect” is the idea of valuing peoples’ deaths. Butler claims that “by a cultural reflex, we mourn for some lives but respond with coldness to the loss of others” (36). In other words, some deaths affect us more deeply than others. Therefore, we value different peoples’ deaths at varying degrees. This idea is exemplified by the character of Oskar Schell in Foer’s novel. He lost the person most important to him during the bombing of the Twin Towers: his father. Oskar is completely shocked by his father’s death and his reaction is scattered throughout the novel. Sometimes he gets “heavy boots”, which is his way of expressing sadness. Other times he is cruel, such as when he tells his mother that he wishes she would have been the one to die in the bombings instead of his dad. Yet, he also feels frustrated. “It makes me incredibly angry that people all over the world can know things that I can’t, because it happened here, and happened to me, so shouldn’t it be mine?” (256). In this case, Oskar is referring to the censorship of images by the USA government regarding the events of 9/11. Oskar wanted to find out how his father died, so he tried to Google search for images to see if he could locate his dad. The death of his father affected him so deeply, that Oskar felt compelled to connect with him once more — in this case, by discovering how he died. If he did not value his father, Oskar would not have made the effort, despite how difficult it was for him to do so.
On the contrary, Oskar has no trouble giving a presentation in class about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan towards the end of WWII. He shows his fourth grade class an interview of a women describing in vivid detail the horror that she experienced while looking for her daughter after the bombs decimated the cities. He then went on to tell his class facts about the bombing, including the diameter of the bomb. Oskar felt no connection to the people who died in these bombings; he learned about facts that had do with the bombs themselves, but displayed no sense of empathy towards the lives lost.
Ultimately, the value of death appears to be a prominent topic in both Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Butler’s “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect”. Oskar displays this idea throughout the novel. He highly values the death of his father, as he was an extremely important figure in Oskar’s life. However, Oskar displays a sense of apathy with regards to those who suffered during the bombings of Japan. After analyzing both pieces of literature, I find that I am left with some questions: why do some deaths affect us more than others? Shouldn’t the fact that someone lost their life be enough to warrant grieving? How do you put a value on someone’s death? Is this desirable? These are questions that will require further debate and analysis in order to be answered.
Until next time, readers!
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect.” Frames of War: When is a Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. 33-62. Print.